Ornette Coleman has followed a strange path. Most of the major figures in jazz spent their late teens and early 20s apprenticing with bands led by veterans eager to surround themselves with young players, such as those run by Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, and Miles Davis. Coleman's early development as a soloist and composer, on the other hand, can only be a matter of speculation. Because Coleman's unusual ideas about music had difficulty finding in a foothold in the post-bop jazz world of the mid-to-late 50s, he had a late start with recording. And so, the first record he appeared on was one issued under his own name: 1958's Something Else! He was 28 at the time.
Coleman's debut stands out in his discography not because of its quality, but because the record features a piano. Coleman was a self-taught student of music who entered the arena with a beef against jazz: he felt that chords exerted an undue influence over improvisation and limited a player's expression. Striving to improvise with greater melodic freedom, Coleman ditched the piano for his second album, Tomorrow Is the Question. Signing with Atlantic in 1959, Coleman obtained a higher profile (and generated controversy) with releases including The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century, all leading up to the 1960 double-quartet release that coined a movement, Free Jazz.
Look again at the titles of these early releases: The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, Free Jazz. One imagines Coleman as a self-confident visionary aware of his effect on the world of music. The title of this recently reissued album provided a similar challenge to the populace: "This is our music," Coleman might have been saying. "Are you going to listen?" Originally released in 1960 (the last Quartet record before the Free Jazz session), This Is Our Music features Coleman on alto, Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums. What amazes me about this era of Coleman, especially in light of the literature surrounding it, is how accessible it is. Back in the day, this band had the intelligentsia calling for Coleman to be fitted for a straightjacket, but to one weaned on the 60s Impulse! catalog, the music sounds joyous, pretty, sensible and sane.
The uptempo tracks here are teeming with life. On "Blues Connotation" and "Folk Tale" the band sounds "in the moment" and brimming with ideas, as if these four- and five-minute compositions are far too brief to ever contain them all. The sporadic surges in tempo are early experiments in elastic time (a trend that would be explored at great length as the 60s progressed), and these bursts of energy make these pieces seem, well, bountiful. Also adding to the loose sense of fun on tracks like "Poise" is the interplay between Coleman and Cherry. At times, they seem to be chasing each other around the tune, while other moments find them doing a modern take on the call-and-response ensemble soling of Dixieland. Despite the occasional rubbery rhythmic passage and playful tone, all the faster pieces here swing in the fullest sense of the word, with Blackwell and Haden's pulse set firmly in the tradition.
If the faster tracks on This Is Our Music come across as buoyant and almost pop, the more drawn-out pieces are mysterious and pleasantly disorienting. "Beauty Is a Rare Thing" is drifting and impressionistic, with Blackwell's drums and Haden's bowed bass used for color and shading instead of rhythm. Cherry and Coleman's lines are not concerned with melody or even pitch, but manage to find expression in a series of squeaks, groans, and grunts. The Quartet's take on the Gershwin standard "Embraceable You" (the only track not composed by Coleman, and indeed the only standard he recorded during this period) is necessarily more conventionally tuneful, but it still moves with a peculiar gait. The theme is familiar, but Blackwell uses mallets for the drums and barely touches the cymbals, and both Cherry and Coleman take serious liberties with the melody.
We'll never know what it was like to hear Ornette Coleman in 1959 and 1960, but there's an upside to encountering music stripped of its context. We can just listen and not concern ourselves with determining which rules are being broken. In 1960, people literally wanted to beat the crap out of Ornette Coleman because of what he was doing to jazz. But now, his work just sounds exceptionally fresh and timeless.
